Insight and Love: An Introduction to Insight Meditation

gentleness

I wrote this book in 1986 during a year’s retreat at The Lifeflow Meditation Centre’s mallee sanctuary in the Riverland in South Australia. Because of this, the writing is very concentrated, direct and, as a friend of mine commented, There’s no ‘I’ in it. I was focused on Insight meditation at the time, so my writing tends to be rather pithy.

Insight meditation produces a state where you see clearly and directly by stripping away everything else. It’s a process of removing all the layers until the core of your mind is revealed––crystalline and clear. Insight is cool rather than warm. It’s for seeing. And this book reflects that state.

However, I decided not to change the text. I’ve always felt that any piece of work, whether music, writing or painting, has its integrity at the time it is created, and to attempt to change it later can destroy that. The book is composed so that each chapter is followed by an interlude. The essays that make up the interludes were written during the same year, and therefore reflect on the same themes, ideas and experiences outlined in the main text.

These short essays can be read separately, or as a commentary on the main text, or can be passed over altogether if you wish. They make the distinction between love and security and follow the theme of letting go; of opening up and consciously learning to be receptive. Their focus is on learning to be instead of always having to do––going inwards and downwards instead of onwards and upwards.

In the West we all learn how to get things together in our lives––how to build things up, how to succeed and grow, and hold on to what we have. I like to sum up our cultural tradition as onwards and upwards. We are very good at it. But we don’t see that life doesn’t always work this way––it’s only half the story. As every move we make eventually balances itself, everything that goes up must come down. So the other half of the story is inwards and downwards.

We believe that what we have built, whether physically or in a career or in a relationship, must not change, must not come unstuck––we have to hold it all together. But of course everything does change and come unstuck. The meditation tradition provides a way to come unstuck skilfully, gracefully and enjoyably. You can learn to go inwards and downwards just as masterfully as you learned to go onwards and upwards.

When you experience this, it dawns on you that being stuck is actually a very painful position to be in. Becoming unstuck, when you learn not to be afraid of it, is extremely blissful. It provides enormous relief, as you discover that the feeling of going in and down accompanies the process of the mind and body regaining their natural balance. Your energies are restored and refreshed. You are completely open to the rich world of your senses and have access to the infinite detail and variety they reveal, which you normally do not notice, and to the world of your intuition.

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Although I trained for ten years in the Buddhist meditation traditions of Burma and Tibet, I was not at all attracted to the cultural and religious beliefs or structures of Buddhism but to the practical knowledge and experience which form the discipline of these traditions. Therefore everything I have taught and written, including this book, is completely free from the inherent jargon which tends to come with anything Buddhist.

This book is based on the practical teaching of Buddhism, which is a discipline to understand the cause of the underlying conflicting emotions that drive human life, and become free from them. I became interested in this discipline because I achieved everything I dreamed of and found it did not make the slightest difference to how I felt internally. I also noticed that neither greatness and brilliance nor a happy marriage guaranteed wisdom or emotional maturity. In fact, often greatness and fame increased insecurity.

It was written at the request of my teacher, Namgyal Rinpoche, after he led a retreat based on the book The Mahamudra, Eliminating the darkness of ignorance (Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala, 1978, translated by Alexander Berzin) by the ninth Karmapa (Wangchug Dorje). The Karmapa is the head of the Karma Kargyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and the title passes from generation to generation––the ninth Karmapa lived in the sixteenth century. I found this text straightforward and practical, accepting the cultural differences, so have used it as a reference ever since, particularly when testing and explaining the experiences and realisations of students in Insight meditation.

Mahamudra means literally, great movement and also great seal. It is a system of study and practice designed to bring about the direct experience of the fundamental, infinite and clear state of our natural consciousness. This experience is called emptiness or openness and is the core realisation of all Buddhist practice and the great seal of Mahamudra. It is the direct experience and seeing of your own mind when it is completely still and free from thoughts––so it is empty of concepts or completely open. From here you perceive the world in the same way, without any thought or self-referencing, and so empty of concepts or again, open or transparent.

The openness and clarity of consciousness is experienced in four distinct seals or stages. This is the core practice of Insight meditation and I explain it in chapter 7. I also describe all the preparatory practices for experiencing the four stages of insight outlined in the Mahamudra tradition. These are explained in a very brief and concentrated form to make them easier to understand and therefore more accessible.

The practice of Tantra is used to integrate the living experience of these four stages by realising a fifth seal of the natural radiance of consciousness––its vibrant, luminous quality. Experiencing for yourself the four different stages of insight into the nature of consciousness, and integrating the fifth level of its radiant state, is the aim of Insight meditation and Tantra. Insight and Tantra complement each other. With Insight you see through the hopes and fears which have always bedevilled human life. With Tantra you embrace life fully and use Insight to ride and transform the emotions that drive us.

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Into the fabric of the text are woven the ideas of Western philosophy and psychology, particularly those of the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. I have linked Insight meditation with our own philosophic tradition, because it is based on the same foundation of question––of not taking anything for granted.

However, what I found unique about Buddhism was its practical meditation tradition where you learn skills in order to gain direct knowledge and experience of how our minds and emotions actually work. You have a teacher with whom everything can be tested, so there is no question of having to believe anything. You have either experienced something or you haven’t, and it can be tested, repeated and sustained.

Here is a system of knowledge and practical techniques for discovering how human consciousness actually works. The difference from any Western form of psychological knowledge is that you actually study your own mind and can experience for yourself direct insight into the way consciousness works and how your perceptions operate. It is a method and form of knowledge unique to the East, and I have come to the conviction that it can be fruitfully integrated into our own culture.

Buddhism also has a rich tradition of psychology and philosophy. Many of the psychological concepts of Buddhism are now being incorporated into modern psychology, and more people have become familiar with the philosophical concepts because of the discoveries in quantum physics. However, what makes the meditation tradition so different from anything in our own culture is the fact that this knowledge is not gained by studying the world, human beings and the mind as objects. It comes from actually experiencing yourself.

You can discover how thinking actually works; see the mind when it is still and has no thoughts in it; see the relationship between your mind and body and between your mind and the objects you are looking at, and see what concepts are and how they affect the perceptions you have of the world. Unlike our own tradition where these things are studied as ideas, here they are tangible experiences that you can feel, see and experience in your own body, here and now.

None of this knowledge is theoretic, because it is based on the very simple premise that it is impossible to know the human mind only by studying others objectively. We are it. The only way to understand human emotions, mental processes and consciousness itself is to have some way of observing our own. And this is what meditation, and the techniques of Insight meditation in particular, enable you to do.

This process can then be extended because it is possible to add to our objective knowledge of the world by understanding that we are an integral part of that as well. The methods and techniques of the meditation tradition can add the missing subjective observations.

Being able to directly experience these things has a profound effect on your life. No longer are these theories, ideas and possibilities just questions which remain divorced from your actual experience. They become embodied, literally, as you feel them and make the connections in yourself between emotions, thoughts, feelings, sensations and concepts. Instead of living only in the mind, working with the ideas of philosophy or having to believe the dogmas of religion, you discover that your whole body is conscious.

Your life changes from feeling busy mentally, and either feeling nothing at all or just empty in the body, to being able to experience both your body and mind as completely integrated. You then know, and can sustain as a living, direct and ever-present experience what the meditation tradition means by radiant presence.

This totally overhauls our Western ideas of consciousness and, in fact, philosophers are just starting to question our notions of consciousness